Very few people make impulse purchases in B2B. They don’t just want to think the $20K+ they’re sinking into your product will be worth it. They want to know it’ll be worth it — and convincing them isn’t easy. B2B buyers know that demos selectively show the best parts of your product and that your references are likely cherry-picked.
But if someone they trust recommends your product (or, better yet, shows exactly how your product handles use cases like theirs), your cold outreach emails and LinkedIn DMs start sounding a lot more compelling. The risk begins to wane.
In a market where customer acquisition costs are high and sales cycles are getting longer, that kind of sway is gold. And B2B influencers are the people who have it.
According to Sprout Social, a quarter of LinkedIn’s 1.2B users interact with brand content every day. And with influencer marketing on the rise — 86 per cent of US marketers will partner with influencers in 2025, reports Statista — it’s important to know what’s fact and fiction.
In this guide, we define what B2B influencer marketing is (and what it isn’t), illustrate why it’s such a valuable marketing strategy, equip you with tools to find the right B2B influencers and explain how to track influencer performance — all with the help of two experts, Nick Latus, VP of Network Success at PartnerStack and Morgan J Ingram, Founder and CEO of AMP Creative.
Welcome to B2B influencer marketing 101
What is influencer marketing in B2B?
In B2B, influencers are subject matter experts who create content that educates and converts.
Unlike B2C influencers, who are often trying to market a certain lifestyle or aesthetic, B2B influencers are promoting bigger-ticket software products that could have a substantial impact on your company’s bottom line.
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To have influence at that scale, you need a wealth of hands-on experience and expertise. For that reason, most B2B influencers have built a following around one thing they are an expert in — like marketing, DevOps or product management — and are people’s go-to for advice.
As Nick Latus, VP of Network Success at PartnerStack, puts it, “The most successful B2B influencers are people who buyers consider a source of truth — and they’re a source of truth because they are an expert in whatever category or vertical they’re talking about. When they offer feedback or insights, people listen.”
Here’s what B2B influencer marketing is not
Because “influencer” is such a buzzword, we wanted to dispel a few misconceptions before we dive deeper into the benefits and how-tos of B2B influencer marketing.
B2B influencers are not just creators
There’s a distinction that needs to be made here: creators ≠ influencers. Morgan J Ingram, Founder and CEO of AMP Creative understands that the two terms are not synonymous, though some conflate them.
“Someone might be really skilled at producing entertaining content on LinkedIn, but I don’t think that makes them an influencer. Creators make content that can get a lot of eyeballs. Influencers create content that gets eyeballs and conversions,” explains Ingram.
Those conversions don’t just come from being good at selling an idea or story. They come from credibility and authenticity.
B2B Influencer marketing creates a range of revenue opportunities
There’s a distinction that needs to be made here: creators ≠ influencers. Morgan J Ingram, Founder and CEO of AMP Creative understands that the two terms are not synonymous, though some conflate them.
“Someone might be really skilled at producing entertaining content on LinkedIn, but I don’t think that makes them an influencer. Creators make content that can get a lot of eyeballs. Influencers create content that gets eyeballs and conversions,” explains Ingram.
Those conversions don’t just come from being good at selling an idea or story. They come from credibility and authenticity.
Other companies, however, skip the affiliate play and incentivize their B2B influencers with a richer offer, like a flat upfront fee. Or, you can blend the two and offer a hybrid compensation, where the B2B influencer would be paid some upfront for their content and then have a performance component whether it’s a cost per lead (CPL) or cost per acquisition (CPA).
Latus recognizes the power of credibility and trust — he sees it in action in the PartnerStack Network. “You want well-respected voices in your industry to be promoting your product in their social channels, creating cool, engaging videos and generally talking about it as much as they can. That requires work and influencers expect to be compensated for it.”
And whatever compensation model you offer, it’s important to ensure that you are building a program with revenue attribution so that whether you’re testing with a small upfront placement or starting with an affiliate use case, you have the ability to track and understand the revenue contribution from your spend.
So, B2B influencers could be paid out with an affiliate commission model — or they could not be. It really depends on the size of influencer you’re hiring, as well as what your goals and budget for that influencer campaign are.
Why B2B companies need influencer marketing
Today’s buyers — and particularly Gen Z and Millennial buyers, who are emerging as a key demographic for B2B sales — are learning about new SaaS tools in so many different ways: through search, AI, LinkedIn, G2 reviews, Slack groups, in-person meetups — you name it. With traditional B2B marketing tactics, your company may end up on one or two channels if you’re lucky. But ending up on their feeds is not enough. You still have to win their trust.
That’s not always an easy feat for traditional sales teams. According to the Gartner B2B Buying Report, 75 per cent of B2B buyers prefer a sales rep-free buying experience.
B2B thought leaders are key to unlocking the rest of your total addressable market (TAM). They’re already participating in conversations on Reddit. They’ve already been invited on industry podcasts. They’re talking about the tools they use every day on LinkedIn posts and YouTube videos and offering their advice for using them. And people respect and trust their opinions above other marketing channels.
Specifically, B2B influencers maximize your reach by:
Humanizing content
It’s hard to make content about SaaS products come to life on the page. Influencers put a face to your brand. More importantly, many of them have been in your buyers’ shoes before. That means they know how to position your product in a way that makes prospects feel smart for picking it.
“B2B sales is about gaining trust, showing how it adds value to your business and employees. Influencers can showcase that better than anyone else,” says Latus. “If someone you trust knows the product you’re already thinking about buying works, you’re much more likely to follow through and make the purchase.”
Expanding into new geos or industries
Influencers may already have followers in specific verticals or regions you’re thinking of expanding to. By leveraging local influencers early on, you can build a waitlist or lead pipeline before you even launch.
Buyers, particularly self-directed B2B buyers, are more likely to trust an influencer who they already follow than a brand they haven’t heard of — who they know is marketing to them.
Filling content gaps
Maybe you don’t have a big creative team, but you want to publish more videos, guides or other forms of content. B2B influencers already have a presence on specific channels and format their content in a way that connects with their audience there. Whether it’s a customer or B2B influencer making a positive endorsement about your product, this is always an opportunity to re-distribute or re-promote the content and even put boosting dollars behind to further the reach.
Tapping into that creativity can amplify your brand in ways you couldn’t have on your own. Plus, it can have other tangential benefits, like an SEO boost from backlinks to your website from their channels. Finally, don’t underestimate the power of having someone else point out what works — it often comes off more authentic and your brand isn’t forced into an awkward humble brag.
Being memorable
“Most brands are producing what I’d call ‘normal content,’ which is stuff that’s not compelling,” says Ingram. “Besides lending authenticity to your brand, B2B influencers can make your brand far more interesting.”
In fact, according to TopRank Marketing’s B2B Influencer Marketing Research Report, unique content (64 per cent) and creative campaigns (61 per cent) are the top influencer marketing strategies to differentiate your brand in the market.
And even if a prospect isn’t ready to buy yet, they'll be more likely to remember an influencer campaign when they finally have the budget to make a purchase — and contact your sales team before a competitor’s.
Finding and engaging the right B2B influencers for your SaaS campaigns
How to identify key opinion leaders in your industry
If you’re just starting a B2B influencer program, finding the right voices can be intimidating — your success depends on it. And that lack of knowledge can be a barrier to starting for many with 60 per cent of B2B firms reporting they felt they didn’t have the skills to start an influencer marketing programs.
But there’s actually a very simple way to figure out the “who’s who” in your industry: ask a trusted source, like your customers.
“For the most part, your customers are the audience you want to target,” Ingram highlights. “You can do your own search for influencers, but asking your customers who they follow is much easier, especially if you want to get going right away.”
Partner marketplaces like PartnerStack’s are another way to find right-fit influencers. In PartnerStack’s Discovery Tool, you can browse hundreds of B2B influencers that have already been identified by PartnerStack as top performers and use built-in filters to sort by:
- Industry
- Audience size
- PartnerStack badges (ie. Top Performer or Rising Star)
Plus, browse through profiles for details like:
- Social media profiles and websites
- Channels the partner uses to promote programs (ie. paid search, email newsletters and social media)
- Count of other programs the partner is already working with
During your research, you can flag partner profiles as ones to revisit or as poor fit to avoid sending future communications. Once you find a B2B influencer that matches your needs, you can send an intro email to the prospective partners you like straight from the PartnerStack platform.
The selection process
Recruiting the right partner matters. To determine whether an influencer’s audience is truly a match for your company, do a deep dive into their most active channels and platforms.
For example, if the influencer is mostly on YouTube, check how many of their videos are directly related to your business, who is leaving comments — ideally very few bots — and how many comments each video gets. You’ll also want to gauge both consistency (how often do new videos go up?) and quality (are the videos eye-catching?).
Latus shares, “The Network Success team can do the vetting for you, sourcing influencers with the audience, social channels, presence, track record and preferred offer structure you are looking for. The Partner Discovery tool plus the Network Success team combo is our secret sauce.”
Working with smaller influencers to drive high engagement
When you’re looking at various B2B influencer profiles, the most important things to assess are:
- Their audience and reach
- That audience’s engagement (this can be impressions, reactions, reposts, comments, etc.)
- The B2B influencer’s perceived credibility
Notice that follower count is not part of those criteria. Ingram notes, “Just because someone has a lot of followers, it doesn’t mean their influence will drive conversions. I myself tell certain brands not to work with me because my content doesn’t naturally align with their goals or ICP.”
Smaller influencers can be a safer bet for new B2B influencer programs. In addition to being more cost-effective, niche influencers often have a more unique or nuanced perspective than larger influencers. They also tend to have a more engaged, captive audience. If the influencer leans into their lived professional experience or data from their network, this can also support credibility.
“If there’s someone at your company who is already a brand enthusiast, putting some money behind their most viral LinkedIn posts is a great place to start,” Ingram advises.
Types of B2B influencer marketing strategies
In B2C, influencers tend to spend their time on Instagram and TikTok. But those aren’t the best channels to attract B2B buyers — at least right now. Social channels can certainly work (see LinkedIn below), but they aren’t the only way for B2B influencers to have an impact.
Here are just a few influencer marketing strategies that are working for B2B right now:
LinkedIn is the primary professional social network. With more than one billion members in 200 countries, there are plenty of new audiences B2B influencers can get your product in front of — if they find ways to cut through the noise and resonate with B2B professionals. In fact, 44 per cent of them ranked it the most important social media platform (beating out YouTube, Instagram and TikTok), according to Statista.
YouTube
Videos are a perfect outlet for tutorials and reviews. Prospects can better visualize how your product works, yes. But they also get to see an influencer’s facial expressions and hear their tone of voice, which lends extra credibility to the words the influencer is saying. That trust is key in converting prospects to buyers. And YouTube isn’t just for tutorials and reviews. Longform “clickbait-y” videos can be effective, too.
Webinars, podcasts and events
Hosting or sponsoring podcasts, webinars and other events are great ways to get your company’s name out there. But your content doesn’t mean as much when it comes from a member of your executive team as it does from a more unbiased source like a B2B influencer.
Ingram shares the changes in strategy he sees, noting, “I’m seeing the industry shift toward using B2B influencers as talking heads — sending a well-known SME to meetups can instantly attract people to your brand. Have them host roundtables or open your user conference.”
Newsletters, review sites and blogs
If a B2B influencer has a popular Substack, having them write about your company in one of their newsletters is a great way to get new people tuned into your product — and remind folks who may have heard of your company before of the impact your product can have on their day-to-day. You could even ask B2B influencers to submit opinion pieces with a small mention of your product to prevailing publishers to give your company even more exposure.
A great strategy to get the most ROI from your B2B influencer campaign is to create an inventory of content to repurpose, including reusing the creator content for your own ad campaigns. See which post performs best and put budget behind it, boosting the creator content or repurposing it across other channels.
Measuring the ROI of B2B influencer marketing
Before you launch your program, you’ll want to know how you will measure it and attribute revenue to the influencer activities. Doing so will help you:
- Design a tracking and reporting process
- Set realistic goals and timelines with your influencers
Because there’s no one way to deploy B2B influencers, there’s no one way to measure their performance. To find out what KPIs will be right for your program, Latus suggests mapping it all out first.
“What’s the strategy behind each influencer? Are they just doing one video and that’s it? How and where are they distributing it? Are they doing a series? Laying this out is critical — not only to get management’s buy-in, but also to measure the right things.”
In case you need some inspiration, here are some more general metrics to pay attention to:
Once you’ve nailed down the key metrics, you’ll need to determine how to attribute leads, signups or transactions to each B2B influencer. You can do that with:
How to overcome common challenges in B2B influencer marketing
B2B influencer marketing is a new frontier. While that can be exciting, it comes with some distinct challenges to watch out for. Here are some of the common obstacles you might face:
Skeptical leadership
If leadership is wary of B2B influencer marketing, you might be in for an uphill battle. “Most people in seats making the big marketing decisions haven’t worked with B2B influencers before and may think influencer marketing is ‘weird’ or out of place for B2B,” Ingram shares.
“Influencer marketing is more of a long game, so you need alignment from your executive team to have the budget and patience for it to work.”
There’s proof that an always-on approach is the most effective strategy when working with B2B influencers, with 99 per cent of teams who do so citing their programs as effective, per the same TopRank report.
Communicating exactly how your B2B influencer program will work, tracking concrete KPIs and connecting those metrics to company goals can help you overcome skeptical leadership and give your program the time to prove ROI.
Compliance and disclosure
The US Federal Trade Commission requires that all influencer partnerships be disclosed clearly and conspicuously. This applies to B2B influencers just as much as B2C. That means your influencers must:
Disclose when they receive compensation, whether it’s free software access, gifts or commissions.
Disclose that their content is a paid partnership with you in a noticeable way (that means not burying them in hashtags or fine print).
Seasoned influencers know this and will take these requirements seriously. But it behooves you to make sure they are following these rules while still keeping your brand and messaging intact.
For more information, see the FTC’s full endorsement guidelines.
Delayed payoff
B2B influencer marketing doesn’t work overnight — and as mentioned previously, they work best as an always-on instead of a one-off tactic. As Ingram puts it, “Two posts does not equal two leads. In my experience, you’ve got to test out an influencer for three to six months before you see results.”
For your executive leadership team, this may be tough to swallow, especially if you’re fronting a good chunk of money to pay for an influencer program. What might put them at ease is examples of other companies of a similar size that had long-term success with B2B influencers. Talk to your peers or contact PartnerStack’s Network Success team to find convincing case studies, like Glide building influencers into their experts partner program.
Limited resources
B2B influencer marketing can be a totally different — and potentially far more involved — motion than a set-and-forget affiliate program. Without a team member dedicated to it, you may struggle to initially find your groove.
Latus explains, “Not only do you need to constantly track what your B2B influencers are doing and the ROI of their activities, you also need to feed them information about your product and your competitors so they can develop content that keeps your product top of mind.”
B2B buyers want real expertise, deep insights and trusted voices guiding their decisions. And the same old blog posts, case studies and product announcements aren’t cutting it in 2025.
“What you’re doing with your marketing right now is probably the same thing everyone else is doing. Why not experiment? Be different? B2B influencers can be your foray into a new way of marketing,” Ingram advises.
B2B influencer marketing is still in its early days, but it’s evolving fast. Companies like Monday.com, Pipedrive and Glide that are embracing it now will have an edge over those who don’t.
And you don’t even have to go big bang with it to be successful. It’s okay to start with a small set of B2B influencers (even just one) and expand from there. As Latus points out, “Influencers themselves will get more creative over time and continue building their following. At the same time, new, fresh voices will come onto the scene that may be an excellent fit.”
Want to find your first B2B influencers? Start your search on the PartnerStack Network.
